1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally directed to a method and apparatus for improving the performance of networks, and more particularly, to a method and system utilizing path selection, path activation, and profiles, in order to improve network performance.
2. Discussion of the Background
The entrenchment of data networking into the routines of modern society, as evidenced by the prevalence of the Internet, particularly the World Wide Web, has placed ever-growing demands on service providers to continually improve network performance. To meet this challenge, service providers have invested heavily in upgrading their networks to increase system capacity (i.e., bandwidth). In many circumstances, such upgrades may not be feasible economically or the physical constraints of the communication system does not permit simply “upgrading.” Accordingly, service providers have also invested in developing techniques to optimize the performance of their networks. Because much of today's networks are either operating with or are required to interface with the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, attention has been focused on optimizing TCP/IP based networking operations.
As the networking standard for the global Internet, TCP/IP has earned such acceptance among the industry because of its flexibility and rich heritage in the research community.
The transmission control protocol (TCP) is the dominant protocol in use today on the Internet. TCP is carried by the Internet protocol (IP) and is used in a variety of applications including reliable file transfer and Internet web page access applications. The four layers of the TCP/IP protocol suite are illustrated in FIG. 18. As illustrated, the link layer (or the network interface layer) 1810 includes device drivers in the operating system and any corresponding network interface cards. Together, the device driver and the interface cards handle hardware details of physically interfacing with any cable or whatever type of media is being used. The network layer (also called the Internet layer) 1812 handles the movement of packets around the network. Routing of packets, for example, takes place at the network layer 1812. IP, Internet control message protocol (ICMP), and Internet group management protocol (IGMP) may provide the network layer in the TCP/IP protocol suite. The transport layer 1814 provides a flow of data between two hosts, for the application layer 1816 above.
In the TCP/IP protocol suite, there are at least two different transport protocols, TCP and a user datagram protocol (UDP). TCP, which provides a reliable flow of data between two hosts, is primarily concerned with dividing the data passed to it from the application layer 1816 into appropriately sized chunks for the network layer 1812 below, acknowledging received packets, setting timeouts to make certain the other end acknowledges packets that are sent, and so on. Because this reliable flow of data is provided by the transport layer 1814, the application layer 1816 can ignore these details. UDP, on the other hand, provides a much simpler service to the application layer 1816. UDP just sends packets of data called datagrams from one host to another, but there is no guarantee that the datagrams reach the other end. Any desired reliability must be added by the application layer 1816.
The application layer 1816 handles the details of the particular application. There are many common TCP/IP applications that almost every implementation provides. These include telnet for remote log-in, the file transfer protocol (FTP), the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) or electronic mail, the simple network management protocol (SNMP), the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and many others.
TCP provides reliable, in-sequence delivery of data between two IP hosts. The IP hosts set up a TCP connection, using a conventional TCP three-way handshake and then transfer data using a window based protocol with the successfully received data acknowledged.
To understand where optimizations may be made, it is instructive to consider a typical TCP connection establishment. FIG. 19 illustrates an example of the conventional TCP three-way handshake between IP hosts 1920 and 1922. First, the IP host 1920 that wishes to initiate a transfer with IP host 1922, sends a synchronize (SYN) signal to IP host 1922. The IP host 1922 acknowledges the SYN signal from IP host 1920 by sending a SYN acknowledgement (ACK). The third step of the conventional TCP three-way handshake is the issuance of an ACK signal from the IP host 1920 to the IP host 1922. IP host 1922 is now ready to receive the data from IP host 1920 (and vice versa). After all the data has been delivered, another handshake (similar to the handshake described to initiate the connection) is used to close the TCP connection.
TCP was designed to be very flexible and works over a wide variety of communication links, including both slow and fast links, high latency links, and links with low and high error rates. However, while TCP (and other high layer protocols) works with many different kinds of links, TCP performance, in particular, the throughput possible across the TCP connection, is affected by the characteristics of the link in which it is used. There are many link layer design considerations that should be taken into account when designing a link layer service that is intended to support Internet protocols. However, not all characteristics can be compensated for by choices in the link layer design. TCP has been designed to be very flexible with respect to the links which it traverses. Such flexibility is achieved at the cost of sub-optimal operation in a number of environments vis-a-vis a tailored protocol. The tailored protocol, which is usually proprietary in nature, may be more optimal, but greatly lacks flexibility in terms of networking environments and interoperability.
An alternative to a tailored protocol is the use of performance enhancing proxies (PEPs), to perform a general class of functions termed “TCP spoofing,” in order to improve TCP performance over impaired (i.e., high latency or high error rate) links. TCP spoofing involves an intermediate network device (the performance enhancing proxy (PEP)) intercepting and altering, through the addition and/or deletion of TCP segments, the behavior of the TCP connection in an attempt to improve its performance.
Conventional TCP spoofing implementations include the local acknowledgement of TCP data segments in order to get the TCP data sender to send additional data sooner than it would have sent if spoofing were not being performed, thus improving the throughput of the TCP connection. Generally, conventional TCP spoofing implementations have focused simply on increasing the throughput of TCP connections either by using larger windows over the link or by using compression to reduce the amount of data which needs to be sent, or both.
Many TCP PEP implementations are based on TCP ACK manipulation. These may include TCP ACK spacing where ACKs which are bunched together are spaced apart, local TCP ACKs, local TCP retransmissions, and TCP ACK filtering and reconstruction. Other PEP mechanisms include tunneling, compression, priority-based multiplexing, policy based routing, and the ability to support failover traffic.
In addition, network performance may be improved utilizing techniques such as path selection, either with or without profiles, and/or path activation, either with or without profiles.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for improved techniques for routing information by activating and selecting the appropriate paths. Therefore, an approach for improving network performance utilizing techniques such as path selection and path activation is highly desirable.
Further, the ability to iteratively failover n (where n is an integer greater than or equal to 2) alternative paths would also improve network performance.